Birmingham airport has record July

[August 8th 2008]

Birmingham airport had its best ever July, handling over one million passengers for the first month this year.

There were 718,958 passengers on scheduled flights from Birmingham and another 317,177 on charter flights, giving a grand total of 1,036,135, an increase of 7.5% over the previous July. The airport also broke the 9.5 million passenger mark for the first time in a 12 month period.

“Biarritz, Bratislava, Bydgoszcz, Gdansk, Olbia, Perpignan, Stockholm and Trapani were all new routes that started from the airport in July, helping to reach these record numbers,” says Birmingham International Airport acting MD, Joe Kelly.

Growth was particularly impressive on flights within the EU, up 20.6%. Passengers on non EU flights were up by 7.3%. Among the most popular destinations from Birmingham in July were Larnaca (up 114.6%), Inverness (+107.2%), Marseille (+75.4%), Hamburg (+40%), Warsaw (+38.3%), Milan (+33.9%), and Krakow (+32.2%). Of the charter flights, the popular holiday destinations of Egypt (+88%), Morocco (+34.1%), Italy (+15.2%), Croatia (+13.2%) all experienced healthy growth.

More good news for Birmingham airport is that Turkish Airlines has announced a new five times a week service to Istanbul starting from December 15th. The airline will fly a 155 seat Boeing 737-800 aircraft on the route, with 20 seats in business class. Connecting flights will be available to over 140 destinations, including Singapore, Cape Town, Bangkok and Bombay, as well as airports around Turkey.

Turkish Airlines has a four star rating from Skytrax, the programme that ranks airline product and service standards, putting it in the same league as Air France, British Airways, Emirates, Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic.

“Although we will be launching in December with five weekly flights, we aspire to be operating daily services from Birmingham by summer 2009 and carrying 30,000 passengers a year by this time,” comments Turkish Airlines director for UK, Osman Battal.

“We are delighted that Turkish Airlines has announced a new service to Istanbul starting in December, and with Ryanair adding an extra ten routes from October it should be a busy second half of the year as well,” says Kelly.

Written by: Nick Purdom

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